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Zed Editor Theme-Builder

zed.dev

71–80 of 88 posts

Re: Zed Editor Theme-Builder

#71
post #69

I tried using it to reproduce my favourite Soda Dark / Sunburst colour combination from Sublime Text. It was a really sisyphean task. In the end I fed some screenshots (and original ST4 config) to AI studio and it came up with something workable but not exactly a replica. Naturally different editors have different semantic tokens.

You could solve this fairly easily by giving an LLM the json definition of your sublime text theme and just transforming it onto a zed spec theme? No need for screenshots.

Re: Zed Editor Theme-Builder

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never liked trackpad. I am an avid RTS player, the mouse is by far the superious input device. Besides, I never work on a laptop. And this is a lame excuse. Smooth scrolling should also work when using keyboard with and pageup/pagedown, at least as an option and with some tuning preferences.

Smooth scrolling also worked on the Amiga Cygnus Editor in 1986 - yes, 40 years ago - on a computer with 512Kb RAM and a ~7MHz 68000 CPU, and from keyboard too. And Zed complains at launch if it doesn't find a suitable Vulkan GPU driver, since the fallback CPU driver does not provide a smooth enough experience, despite 4-5 orders of magnitude more RAM, and a ~3 orders of magnitude faster CPU, than a 40 years old Amig…

Isn’t this just a case of not wanting to or having the resources to maintain a fallback renderer?

Supporting basically-compliant Vulkan GPUs covers probably 99.9% of developer machines. You need a pretty big user base to make it make sense to support the last 0.1% of people without access to a proper GPU driver.

I hope Zed reaches that scale, since I really like the project. But right now I would be a bit disappointed if that was a priority.

Re: Zed Editor Theme-Builder

#73
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is cool. It's a shame DDH is who he is, which stops me using it.

The fact that he's so anti-immigration as an immigrant himself is so odd. My rather negative interpretation is he doesn't consider himself to be an immigrant which screams white supremacy.

Immigrants are called “expats” when they are white.

I’m from the same country as DHH. Personally, not terribly sad that he left.

Re: Zed Editor Theme-Builder

#75
Cool to see all the progress with Zed, but it feels a bit too tied to user accounts. Prominent 'Sign In' buttons and ads like 'Try our new agentic...' They do have to make money and that's fine - but too often incentives start out this way and begin to corrupt the application...

Whats next, ads inside file searches? (ubuntu blundered this way and soured the community) - "LQQKING for something? try new ai search by blah blah corp!"

So it's hard to 'invest' my time tweaking my editor and theme only to have it start to betray me in the future. VSCode has already gone down this path - signing commit messages with 'copilot'

Re: Zed Editor Theme-Builder

#76

Zed is "almost there" for me. The theme builder is good and easy to use, and I only needed a few minutes to make my own. Syntax coloring is almost there, but still lacking (I use C/C++) Small visual adjustment like line height in the UI text is not configurable enough (only two settings) Scrolling should have a smooth option, nothing prevents it, it should be super easy to add, I find it easier on the eyes when I mov…

Tried it for a first time and it took five minutes for a major bug to appear - UI fully freezing. I thought it was only scrolling that froze at first, but tried it again (easy to reproduce), and it's the whole UI. Switching apps makes it work again. Haven't seen this behavior in any other app.

When trying to report it, I was presented with a form longer than my tax returns. Bug reporting seems like a good place for an AI. Both for the input and later categorization.

Re: Zed Editor Theme-Builder

#78
post #71
post #69

I tried using it to reproduce my favourite Soda Dark / Sunburst colour combination from Sublime Text. It was a really sisyphean task. In the end I fed some screenshots (and original ST4 config) to AI studio and it came up with something workable but not exactly a replica. Naturally different editors have different semantic tokens.

You could solve this fairly easily by giving an LLM the json definition of your sublime text theme and just transforming it onto a zed spec theme? No need for screenshots.

Wasn't enough (at least with Gemini 3). I had do a few round trips with screenshots until it got all the details.

Re: Zed Editor Theme-Builder

#79
post #76

Zed is "almost there" for me. The theme builder is good and easy to use, and I only needed a few minutes to make my own. Syntax coloring is almost there, but still lacking (I use C/C++) Small visual adjustment like line height in the UI text is not configurable enough (only two settings) Scrolling should have a smooth option, nothing prevents it, it should be super easy to add, I find it easier on the eyes when I mov…

Tried it for a first time and it took five minutes for a major bug to appear - UI fully freezing. I thought it was only scrolling that froze at first, but tried it again (easy to reproduce), and it's the whole UI. Switching apps makes it work again. Haven't seen this behavior in any other app. When trying to report it, I was presented with a form longer than my tax returns. Bug reporting seems like a good place for a…

That's interesting. I've been using Zed for over a year. I've had one or two crashes over that year, which is very stable for using it all day every day.

Re: Zed Editor Theme-Builder

#80

This feels shallow, but one of the biggest things keeping me from using zed is the lack of a good default dark theme. The defaults all feel very low contrast, gray on gray that makes the experience feel dull and off putting to me, even if the editor itself is great.

Add this to fix the contrast in all your dark themes:

  "experimental.theme_overrides": {
    "background": "#111",
    "panel.background": "#111",
    "text": "#eee",
    "text.muted": "#ccc",
    "title_bar.background": "#111",
    "tab_bar.background": "#111",
    "toolbar.background": "#111",
    "status_bar.background": "#111",
    "element.selected": "#333",
    "editor.background": "#000",
    "editor.gutter.background": "#000"
  }
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